There's a saying in the financial markets, "It's not the news, it's the reaction." You gauge the market's reaction by direction, price change, and volume.
The last place Red Sox have decided it's not the team it's the announcer. Strong organizations have a consistent theme, product, financial stability, and market. Weak organizations chase the latest fads, find new financial models and CFOs, and lose their market. Now they've decided you can't fire all the players, fire the announcer.
The Red Sox have opted to go cheap (got extraordinarily lucky in 2013, which a lot of us said) and won a Championship. They believed their own press clippings, analytics uber all, and that you could but a dollar's worth of goods for twenty-five cents. Yes, Jonny Gomes, Shane Victorino, David Ross and others overachieved. But they still had Lester, Lackey, and extraordinary good fortune with an unpredictable non-Gaussian performance by Koji Uehara as closer.
Management seems constantly to shift directions...run prevention, run creation at the expense of pitching, go with the local guy (Sam Kennedy), jettison the local guy (Theo, Cherington, Orsillo), the bizarre fealty to Larry Lucchino (Bobby Valentine), get high priced hitters with known warts (Sandoval conditioning, Hanley intensity) and so on.
At the end of the day, the Fan Experience isn't walking up the concourse to see the bright lights and the green grass. It's about seeing quality baseball...guys who play the game the right way night after night. Do more of what's working and less of what's not. We understand that quality people, e.g. Justin Masterson, sometimes won't work out. We recognize that injuries (Pedroia, Vasquez) impact the defense.
Whatever the problem with the Fan Experience, the mercurial management themes and nonsensical decisions show poor judgement by management. That isn't excusing the bad baseball (miscounting outs, shoddy baserunning, swinging at bad pitches) or bad managing (e.g. burying Xander Bogaerts last season and sticking with Hanley Ramirez in left this year).
Making Don Orsillo walk the plank just alienates the fans one more time. When is enough enough?
